Arch Linux

ipatch

Member

Registered: 2014-05-14

Posts: 26

Dual booting arch and OS X on a MBPr (late 2013)

Hello, I am trying to dual boot an archlinux install with OS X.  I stumbled across this guide, but it doesn't cover everything unfortunately.  I managed to make a partition for arch, format a filesystem on the partition, setup a user, change some passwords, and install the base and base-devel systems to the newly created partition.  Next I installed the grub2 package, and created a boot.efi file that I moved to a 128MB HFS+ partition formatted with hfsprogs.  Then I created the necessary directory structure on the 128MB HFS+ partition so when I hold down the option key the computer recognizes the boot.efi as a valid boot option.

Now this is where I am getting stuck.  When the computer boots grub2 from the boot.efi file it boots into a grub rescue console.  I have a grub.cfg on a different partition on the disk, and it has a menu entry for arch, but for whatever reason I don't think the grub2 boot.efi is even seeing / recognizing the grub.cfg file.  Any help would be appreciated.

Last edited by ipatch (2014-05-21 17:49:57)

SolarBoyMatt

Member

Registered: 2012-01-07

Posts: 263

Re: Dual booting arch and OS X on a MBPr (late 2013)

That guide is almost a year old, the wiki entry for running Arch on Macbooks might be more helpful.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ma … _from_GRUB

\hbar

Member

Registered: 2014-03-15

Posts: 165

Re: Dual booting arch and OS X on a MBPr (late 2013)

I'm confused about something in the tutorial you mentioned. There are two boot partitions, one HFS+ and another ext4, whereas I was under the impression that an EFI system partition has to be formatted in FAT32 (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UE … Partition). So why are there two, and why are they formatted differently? And if you have OSX installed, isn't there already a boot partition called "EFI"? Can't you use that as a boot partition?

The configuration file is supposed to be included in grub.efi by running grub-mkstandalone (briefly discussed here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ma … h_OS_X.29).